Jessica Q. Stark’s newest collection of poems, Buffalo Girl, is a fairytale—but not the kind that makes you feel good in the end. That isn’t to say this collection is not wonderful (it is) but Stark’s pseudo-mythological reckoning with violence, racism, motherhood, and questions of home aren’t meant to comfort. These are not the fables to read if you want a happy ending; these are the fables to read if you want rebellion, revenge, and—okay, maybe a little joy, too. But that’s what this collection does: it contradicts, not in the way black and white are opposite, but the way gray is both light and dark, the way love can be tender and harsh. In registers that shift between images and the language of myth, memory, and history, Stark creates a collage that interrogates what it means to embody contradiction: to be both Vietnamese and American, to be both desired and reviled; to be capable of violence and love.
The collection opens in that space with the prefatory poem, “Against Knowing,” which in many ways acts as a thesis statement for how to read the rest of the book. With the very first line, “Against naming, too,” the notion that anything in this collection will be easily categorized breaks apart. Stark’s poem reveals that even language itself in this collection may be slippery and misleading, whether intentionally or not. She writes, “Against California’s / exclusion of diacritics // Against emptying / nuance into mess // cu, cu, cu: / root, penis old // tao, tao, tao: / apple, nonsense, create.” Unaccented in their English spellings—or, with the “exclusion of diacritics,” these Vietnamese words change meaning drastically, and draw attention to one of the collection’s central impulses: erasure. In this example of language, it’s an erasure of nuance, understanding, and in a sense, truth. More formally, this poem gestures toward the book’s larger artistic conceit in Stark’s erasures of several versions of the Little Red Riding Hood folktale, and in the images she includes: Walter Crane’s Little Red Riding Hood illustrations; black-and-white photographs belonging to Stark’s mother, Kimle Mac Quick; and Stark’s own color photography of landscapes in Jacksonville, Florida. These photos, often collaged or layered, are interspersed throughout the book, and create erasures of their own even as parts of them are erased.
Some feel innocuous, even whimsical, such as a colorful erasure of a Little Red Riding Hood illustration with a lush, green and white floral photo of Stark’s showing through, Red looking over her shoulder into a world not her own. Others are more ominous, like a series of black and white photos of men whose faces and bodies have been erased to let Stark’s green nature photography show through. In the photos where a woman is present with her arm around the erased man, what she appears to be holding is a hole, though not an empty one: like Red looking over her shoulder, the young woman in these photos appears to cling not to a man, but a promise, a new and different world. In others still, the same young woman is overlaid on Stark’s lush landscapes by herself, often riding a scooter, and while at first glance they too seem whimsical, perhaps even hopeful, unsettling questions remain: What is behind the woman? What has been erased? What did she have to do to get here?
Stark’s poems reveal that one answer is sex work. In “Why Are You So Sad, Red?,” a poem that nearly bisects the book, the Little Red Riding Hood legend collides with the dualistic image of the buffalo, both in reference to Vietnam’s water buffalo and the 1844 blackface minstrel song “Buffalo Gals,” which refers to sex workers in Buffalo, New York. In this poem, Red visits the wolf, who—an earlier poem tells us—she was in love with, and finds him at home with, presumably, his wife and baby. The poem seems to act as a turning point for Red; she retreats into the woods and grows “hardened hooves;” she makes a choice: “If she couldn’t become a new dawn, she’d settle for a buffalo. Sweet shadow singing to herself, responsible only to the grass and its tough love, hard work, circumstance, circumstance, cruelty, more laughter, and to no one, no one here by that name.” Rather than becoming a victim, though, Red (and the other women in the collection) make their buffalo-ness their strength, even as they endure generations of violence.
The book’s final poem, “Aubade with Buffalo Girls in Flight,” ends on that rebellious note of hope: “I didn’t come here to sing silly songs. I was born into this day // a buffalo. I will die one, too.” In this poem, the speaker confronts both her mother and herself, both of them slipping between the roles of Red, wolf, and buffalo, asking “How one could be vicious and still be / love, still be kind, but never still.” This collection is a fierce refusal—to be categorized, to be victimized, to be a subject of the white gaze or the plaything of violent men. In these poems and pictures, Stark asks us to be comfortable with—or at least not shy away from—discomfort, to listen to these women telling their truths, even if we don’t always understand it: “Oh reader, must we simply explain everything? Must we know it all?”
Buffalo Girl, by Jessica Q. Stark. Rochester, New York: BOA Editions Ltd, April 2023. 136 pages. $21.00, paper.
Raye Hendrix is a writer and photographer from Alabama. Her debut poetry collection, What Good Is Heaven, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in their Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series (2024). Also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Raye is the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and the Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review, 2018). Their poems appear in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Poet Lore, and others. Raye is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon and an editor at Press Pause Press and DIS/CONNECT: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press). Find out more at rayehendrix.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 